[Beowulf] SSD prices

[Robert G. Brown]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2008, Greg Lindahl wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 11:04:47AM +1100, Chris Samuel wrote:
>
>> Hmm, I was thinking that until I read this blog post by
>> one of the kernel filesystem developers (Val Henson from
>> Intel) who had some (possibly Apple specific) concerns
>> about data corruption & reliability and why she still
>> chooses spinning disks over SSD.
>
> Nothing new in that blog post. We'll find out the actual reliability
> of this generation of flash SSD when they've been around for a while,
> and not an anecdote sooner.

It does look worth noting that one should get SLC and not MLC SSD for
any "disk like" application.  It's faster (10x faster) and they argue
much more reliable.  More expensive, too, of course.

I think somebody mentioned Transcend -- they apparently are
concentrating on SLC only (and claim ECC) and their prices still look
pretty competitive.

I'm not sure SSD is perfect for userspace hard storage, but for basic
operating system images it seems reasonable.  How many times does one
write to the read-mostly stuff in /, /usr, /lib, /etc?  Surely nothing
like the thousands of times minimum one is SUPPOSED to be able to
rewrite.

   rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu